Newman v4.0

Earlier this week, we released Newman version 4. Newman is the open-source companion CLI tool for Postman and allows you to run Postman collections from command line. We created version 4 to improve the stability of the tool, and make contributing to Newman easier. As a result, the updates fall into two broad categories:

1. Discontinue features that were previously deprecated.
2. Give feature-heavy Newman reporters their own codebase outside Newman.

Things that may affect you when you upgrade

Upgrading to New version 4 is optional, but recommended.

Changes around CLI parameters

We discontinued the CLI options that were deprecated, coincidentally, on this month two years back. More detail on these deprecated, now discontinued, options can be seen here.

The only breaking change made was --no-color CLI option was dropped, and its features merged with the --color switch. (And yes, we too are wondering about how ended up adding the contradicting options!) Beyond that, we improved the underlying parsing of your CLI options that removed some of the unintended side-effects that the CLI had around ordering of your CLI parameters.

Changes around reporters

Newman reporters are essentially Newman plugins that track a collection run and produces reports in various formats. Newman has a few of them built in and there are quite a few ones built and maintained by the community.

In this release, we moved our most popular reporter — the HTML reporter — to a codebase of its own. Why? That’s because we want to add more features to the reporter and let our community add more features without the fear of having any impact on Newman itself.

So, in the coming weeks and months, you can expect your feature requests and contributions to make their way quickly through to a release. The HTML reporter options remain the same, and the only change for you would be to install the reporter before using it.

The docker images of Newman were updated as well. Watch out for the changes you’d need to do to install custom reporters before running the image.

Bye bye Node v4

We’ve retained support for Node v4 for some time, and like most of NodeJS community, we’ve now moved on to Node v6. This move will allow us to take advantage of better performance of NodeJS v6, and also add features to the Sandbox inside the Postman app, that were previously limited by Node v4

Upgrade to Newman v4

Overall, the upgrade path should be smooth for most and the major gotchas should be limited to the ones mentioned above. There are a few bug fixes around CSV parsing (for data files) that may also be of interest. So, checkout the changelog, readme and migration guide for the full set of changes. And if you still have issues, there’s always the issue tracker and community as a trusty place to get your questions answered.